Bill Mitchell — British Labour surrenders to the middle class and big business interests

More UK politics than MMT, but worth reading for Bill's take on British democracy. He also has some interesting words on Edmund Burke and his contemporary applicability.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
British Labour surrenders to the middle class and big business interests
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Chris Dillow — Socialism in one country

The takeaway:

The appropriate modes of economic organization vary from country to country. In saying this, I’m following Edmund Burke, who wrote:

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

The answer might lie in a distinction made by Burke as described (pdf) by Jesse [Norman]. He distinguished between “embodied” reason – which proceeds from concrete actually-existing conditions – and abstract reason which began from theory. Those who give blanket, worldwide support to either capitalism or socialism are perhaps too prone to abstract reason and too little to embodied reason....

Marx also distinguished between rational abstraction and concrete abstraction, following Kant and Hegel. This distinction is often overlooked in Anglo-American thought.

Stumbling and Mumbling
Socialism in one country
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Chris Dillow — On Burkean Marxism

On social, political, and economic thought. Reconciling Burke as icon of the right and Marx as icon of the left.

Where Hayek and economic liberals go wrong is equating the wisdom of crowds with the invisible hand of the market rather than the evolutionary process that reveals the wisdom of the species. Markets are a manifestation of that species wisdom but not the whole of it.

Free markets do not necessarily lead to free individuals in a free society in which all can unfold their potential.

A big gripe Marxists have with capitalism is that it is a system of domination; in the workplace and in politics, only a few have effective power. By contrast, under communism such domination will cease; communism is a society “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In this sense, communism replaces the rule of foolish individuals with that of the wise species. It therefore facilitates Burkeanism in a way which capitalism cannot.

Stumbling and Mumbling
On Burkean Marxism
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Richard Bourke — Burke was no conservative

Edmund Burke, one of the great statesmen and philosophers of the 18th century, is the founder of modern conservatism. Or so it is commonly held: authorities, from Corey Robin on the left to Niall Ferguson on the right, agree that conservative ideology can be traced to this original source. The view has in fact been commonplace in the United States since the 1950s and has steadily been gaining currency across the globe. Admirers of Burke’s ‘traditionalism’ can be found in numerous countries, as different as the Netherlands and Japan. Yet there is something deeply misleading about this view of conservatism’s origins. Burke was a reforming Whig of the 18th-century British parliament whose ideas were not developed with modern politics in mind.

Even if we imagine Burke as our contemporary, his commitments are not in any way compatible with conservatism. For example, he was a defender of colonial rights against the British Empire during the period of the American Revolution. In lending his support to American defiance, he opposed the reigning tenets of British imperial policy and took a stand against successive ministries at Westminster. His defence of colonial rights included support for insurrection, for violent resistance against established authority. It is hard to reconcile this endorsement of revolt with what are usually regarded as conservative ideals.…

Conservatives have either ignored Burke’s support for colonial rebellion, or maintained that his career was split between two phases: an early period of support for the ‘liberal’ cause of America and a later ‘conservative’ reaction to the Revolution in France. Burke certainly changed his opinions over the course of his career, but these shifts cannot be captured by presuming a contradiction between his support for American resistance and his aversion to the revolution in France. Representations of Burke as a renegade from early idealism are based on the dogmatic assumption that the American and French revolutions were fundamentally ‘the same’. Yet for Burke these two events were absolutely different, and in fact he had good reasons for insisting on their difference.…

For anyone concerned to focus on what matters in politics, they would be better off evaluating the substance of particular issues than reaching to enlist canonical thinkers in contemporary causes by branding them with complacent and misleading categories.

Aeon
Burke was no conservative

Richard Bourke

Interesting tidbit of contemporary relevance:

Burke’s view was that Westminster confused its authority with its power. In being affronted by the audacity of the Americans, the British ministry began to fear for its own dignity. Instead of bolstering its standing by public acts of goodwill, the government resorted to shows of strength. As a result, each time Westminster tried to demonstrate its potency, it compromised its standing in the eyes of the colonists. The underlying irony was that the more the metropole opted to display its might, the more it undermined its moral authority. Imperial militancy thus led to imperial impotence.

Paul Grenier — “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

The US is caught in one of the many paradoxes and contradictions of liberalism. Forcing others to be liberal is illiberal.

The West, and specifically the United States, has before it a fateful choice: should it seek a ‘live and let live’ co-existence of the liberal and non-liberal nations of the world, or should it try to make the rest of the world liberal at gunpoint, and in that way prove that history really has finally ended? Should we make the world safe for diversity, or should we make the world uniform for the safety of the United States?....

... is the United States willing to countenance the existence, on a permanent basis, of other great powers that do not accept liberal civilizational values as America defines them? I say other ‘great powers’ because in the long run only a great power, or a protectorate of a great power, can assure its own continued existence.....

Western civilization, which is now characterized by American liberalism, is not the only great civilization, and the other great civilizations do not have traditions of liberalism. They tend to be conservative instead. While Western liberalism is traced to Athenian democracy and the Roman republic, those were exceptions rather than the rule. Even much Western liberalism is liberal (Burkean) conservatism.

Johnson's Russia List
Paul Grenier: “A Conservative Russia? This Means War! (The Tragedy of American Ideology)”

Paul Grenier

See also

Paul Grenier, The Varieties of Russian Conservatism. at The American Conservative

First Principles
Burkean Conservatism
Peter J. Stanlis | Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Rockford College.

The author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, which appeared in 1955 and revolutionized the way Burke was viewed by scholars, Professor Stanlis promised Frost in 1944 that he would someday write the best book about Frost's art and thought that he had it in him to write. Stanlis's previous monograph on Frost is titled Robert Frost: The Individual and Society. 

Chris Dillow — History & Wealth: Burke Vs Rand

In those remarks, Obama was criticizing Randian Conservatives - who are sadly not confined to the US - with their silly idea that today's rich are heroic self-made men. But there is another strand of conservatism which is wholly consistent with the idea that we owe our fortune to the past. Edmund Burke famously said that society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Which raises a paradox. Whilst economic research now supports Burke's view, much of the right no longer does so, preferring ahistorical inidividualist tosh. But as Will says:

A Conservative without a sense of history is just a whining, pleading bully.

Stumbling and Mumbling
History & Wealth: Burke Vs Rand
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle